Wine is spoiled grape juice. It’s old squished grapes mixed with yeast that get you drunk. But lots of people have a lot of things to say about wine, and maybe you’ve wondered what it is that gets them so jazzed over rotten grapes. Well, a lot of their enjoyment comes from biology, chemistry and psychology, as well as the kinds of molecules that travel from the glass into your body.

NOT UNLIKE THE ant-decapitating fly and the satanic leaf-tailed gecko, the fang blenny’s name does not disappoint. This tiny fish wields two massive teeth that it uses to gouge chunks out of much larger fish and, in a bind, scrap its way out of the grasp of a predator. And one particular group of fang blenny even injects venom, just like a snake, to give its attackers that extra what-for.

In 2009, Kerry McPhail descended Jacques Cousteau-style towards the Axial Volcano, inside the cramped, 30-year-old little submarine DSV Alvin, with a pilot and another scientist. Three hundred miles off the coast of Oregon, they were collecting tubeworms, bacterial mats and bivalves living near a deep sea volcanic vent. These samples could potentially yield new pharmaceutical compounds—and in turn, new chemical cures and desperately needed antibiotics that are yet undiscovered.